check-disk-usage-with-du.md

Check disk usage with du command

Find files that are eating up hard drive space with the du command.

To check the memory usage of directories, use du:

du -h my-project-dir

This prints the disk usage of both my-project-dir and each subdirectory. The -h prints results in 'human readable' format (i.e. Kilobytes, Megabytes, etc.)

Other flags

• -a Flag will print all files and directories
• -c Provides a grand total usage on the last line
• -s Summarize each result (only display total for each argument)

Exclude certain files from the listing

Use --exclude to not show files that match a pattern.

du -ah --exclude="*.txt" my-project-dir 

See size that would be transferred over a network

Use --apparent-size to see the apparent file size, rather than disk usage. This is useful for estimating the size that would be transferred over a network.

du -sh --apparent-size /path/to/directory

See the man page for more details.